

Health data company S-3, which scours the internet for drug sellers, to The last six months, it has also been using intelligence from public To drug sales - have allowed the company to increase the number ofĪccounts removed by 112% during the first half of 2021. Said improvements to its proactive detection tools - which useĪrtificial intelligence to identify pictures, words and emojis related “And they need to be a partner in stopping it.” They are dying at record rates,” she said in an interview with Kate Snow on NBC’s “TODAY” show. “They need to understand that Americans are dying. Were not doing enough to stop the sale of counterfeit pills on their 27, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said social media companies The announcement comes less than one week after NBC News profiled eight parents whose children had died after taking a single fentanyl-laced pill purchased on Snapchat. “We are determined to remove illegal drug sales from our Including cases where fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills were purchasedįrom drug dealers on Snapchat,” said Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, inĪ blog post. Have heard devastating stories from families impacted by this crisis, These pills are widely available on social media platforms including Snapchat, and 2 in 5 of those seized and tested in the United States contain enough fentanyl to kill, according to a warning issued by the Drug Enforcement Administration last month. The company said it has improved the automated systems it uses to detect the sale of illegal drugs on the app, hired more people to respond to law enforcement requests for data during criminal investigations and developed an in-app education portal called Heads Up focused on the dangers of fentanyl and counterfeit pills.Ĭounterfeit prescription pills that look just like legitimate medications, such as Percocet, Ox圜ontin or Xanax, but actually contain a deadly dose of potent synthetic opioid fentanyl have been linked to a wave of deaths in the United States over the last few years. These tools aim to warn users about the dangers of those pills in anĮffort to keep its community safe from the “devastating impacts of theįentanyl crisis,” the company announced Thursday. Report: a lot of internet plugs are virtually schoolteachers, offering harm reduction information along with their illicit wares.Snapchat has developed new tools and educational content toĬrack down on the sale of deadly counterfeit pills on the messaging app. "It is concerning that many young people in the UK are bombarded by these advertisements but are unlikely to be in receipt of good quality drugs education."Īu contraire, Mr. "Seeing drugs advertised for sale on social media may normalise drug use," says Volteface's report. This chillaxed take on drug deals so illegal worries researchers at Volteface.


"It's no longer this scary concept of this hooded person on the street." "The dynamic between the buyer and the dealer has changed," a 17-year-old told SkyNews. (The commonest drug dealing platforms were Snapchat and Instagram, and the commonest drugs advertised were, in order: weed, coke, ecstasy, xanax, whippets and lean.) Social media drug dealing is so common, so normal, that only half of the kids Volteface talked to were worried that it was somehow "bad." To them, it's just another post. And he said he was part of a collective delivering worldwide. But placing that order was only a little harder than getting GrubHub burgers. Within a half hour, he said he'd deliver a gram of 2c-i - a drug said to be wonderful but which I've never seen in real life - to my house that afternoon, for $100 - a decent price. His bio listed my city, Denver, and his name on Wickr, a private messaging app. On my Twitter feed, for example, there was a guy whose name was something like PlugForYou, with emojis of mushrooms and pills. The algorithms know where you live, and will connect you to plugs nearby. Follow a drug dealer, and the algorithms suggest more drug dealers to follow. The mainstream media is fixated on drug dealing on the Dark Net - a secret-ish back alley of the Internet.īut the Dark Net requires a tricky program called TOR, and cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Litecoin - a headache.įacebook and Twitter deals are more dangerous than the Dark Net, but so much easier.
